Network technologies have grown rapidly in recent years and various standards have been promulgated for different types of networks, e.g., Institute for Electronics and Electrical Engineers (“IEEE”) 802.11 Wide Local Area Networkss (“WLANs), IEEE 802.16 Wide Metropolitan Area Networks (“WMANs”) and other networks such as 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Cellular Networks, Private Networks, Wired LANs, and Ultra Wide Band (“UWB”) wireless networks. In particular, wireless networks have proliferated at a rapid pace as computer users have become increasingly mobile.
Various manageability elements or “manageability cores” (hereafter “MC”) may perform specialized management functions on the wireless networks. MCs may include a variety of components such as a “manageability engine” on an Intel® processor platform (e.g., utilizing Active Management Technologies (“AMT”), “Manageability Engine” (“ME”) or Platform Resource Layer (“PRL”), a protected virtual machine on a virtualization platform, a secured and memory partitioned Operating System (“OS”) running on one core of a multi-core Intel® platform, an integrated Trusted Platform Module (“TPM”) with a “manageability engine”, or, within the context of a mesh network, the MC may include a mesh node. Each MC may comprise hardware, firmware and/or software drivers that implement the appropriate protocol for the network (e.g., IEEE 802.11) to enable the MC to connect to the network, say an IEEE 802.11 Access Point. MCs may additionally include the hardware, firmware and/or software components for securely communicating with the network services authentication and authorization servers.
MCs typically include stand-alone, headless devices on client end-points such as mobile laptops, mobility handhelds, desktops, servers, and other such platforms, and they are usually connected to backend automated systems. In other words MCs may exist within any of those client end-points and are responsible for getting the client end-points automatically connected to the wireless network(s) as well as maintaining the devices on the networks. As a result, the MCs focus solely on management tasks, i.e., the traffic generated by the MCs (hereafter “manageability traffic”) varies from the normal data and voice traffic on typical user networks. For example, manageability traffic is typically intermittent and occurs in short bursts. Additionally, manageability traffic may tolerate more delays than typical user traffic, does not have to compete with the user traffic and is typically end-to-end protected.
Manageability traffic is thus effectively running on its own virtual network (hereafter “manageability network”), existing within a typical wireless network. In other words, since these manageability networks do not require the full feature sets necessary for typical user network traffic (e.g., Quality of Service (“QoS”) capabilities, standard power saving features, special features for traffic prioritization, fast handoffs, etc.), they may be treated as specialized virtual networks, distinct from the underlying user networks. The “reduced” feature set required by manageability traffic may hereafter be referred to as a “manageability feature set”.